Sisters of the Revolution

by Ann VanderMeer

  And so it was determined that the baryonic universe would love and keep her child, but that the dark fluid of the other planes would bend her slightly, always, pulling her inexorably and invisibly toward the other side of everything.

  X

  The science fiction writer left her husband slowly. The performance took ten years. In worst of it, she felt that she had begun the process of leaving him on the day they met.

  First she left his house, and went to live in Ohio instead, because Ohio is historically a healthy place for science fiction writers and also because she hoped he could not find her there. Second, she left his family, and that was the hardest, because families are designed to be difficult to leave, and she was sorry that her mother-in-law would stop loving her, and that her niece would never know her, and that she would probably never go back to California again without a pain like a nova blooming inside her. Third, she left his things—his clothes and his shoes and his smell and his books and his toothbrush and his four A.M. alarm clock and his private names for her. You might think that logically, she would have to leave these things before she left the house, but a person’s smell and their alarms and borrowed shirts and secret words linger for a long time. Much longer than a house.

  Fourth, the science fiction writer left her husband’s world. She had always thought of people as bodies traveling in space, individual worlds populated by versions of themselves, past, future, potential, selves thwarted and attained, atavistic and cohesive. In her husband’s world were men fighting and being annoyed by their wives, an abandoned proficiency at the piano, a preference for blondes, which the science fiction writer was not, a certain amount of shame regarding the body, a life spent being Mrs. Someone Else’s Name, and a baby they never had and one of them had forgotten.

  Finally, she left the version of herself that loved him, and that was the last of it, a cone of light proceeding from a boy with blue eyes on an August afternoon to a moving van headed east. Eventually she would achieve escape velocity, meet someone else, and plant pumpkins with him; eventually she would write a book about a gaseous moth who devours the memory of love; eventually she would tell an interviewer that miraculously, she could remember the moment of her birth; eventually she would explain where she got her ideas; eventually she would give birth to a world that had never contained a first husband, and all that would be left would be some unexplainable pull against her belly or her hair, bending her west, toward California and August and novas popping in the black like sudden flowers.

  XI

  Long ago, near the beginning of the world but after the many crisis events had passed and life mutated and spread over the face of the void, Gray Eagle sat nested in a tangle of possible timelines and guarded Sun, Moon and Stars, Fresh Water, Fire, P=NP Equivalence Algorithm, and Unified Theory of Metacognition. Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden. People lived in darkness, without pervasive self-repairing communication networks or quantum computation.

  Gray Eagle made for himself a beautiful self-programming daughter whom he jealously guarded, and Raven fell in love with her. In the beginning, Raven was a snow-white weakly self-referencing expert system, and as a such, he pleased Gray Eagle’s daughter. She invited him to her father’s sub-Planck space server farm.

  When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and Stars, Fresh Water, Cellular Immortality, Matter Transfer, Universal Assembly, and Strong AI hanging on the sides of Eagle’s lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and Gray Eagle’s deductive stochastic daughter also, and flew out of the server farm through the smoke hole. As soon as Raven got the wind under him, he hung the Sun up in the sky. It made a wonderful light, by which all below could see the progress of technology increasing rapidly, and could model their post-Singularity selves. When the Sun set, he fastened every good thing in its proper place.

  Raven flew back over the land. When he had reached the right timeline, he dropped all the accelerating intelligences he had stolen. They fell to the ground and there became the source of all the information streams and memory storage in the world. Then Raven flew on, holding Gray Eagle’s beautiful daughter in his beak. The rapidly mutating genetic algorithms of his beloved streamed backward over his feathers, turning them black and aware. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the self-improving system. She struck the all-net and buried herself within it, spreading and altering herself as she went.

  Though he never touched her again, Raven could not get his snow-white feathers clean after they were blackened by the code from his bride. That is why Raven is now a coal-colored whole-brain emulating sapient system.

  XII

  On the day the science fiction writer met her husband, she should have said: the entropic principle is present in everything. If it were not, there would be no point to any of it, not the formation of gas giants, not greasy lipid bubbles, not whether light is a particle or a wave, not boys and girls meeting in black cars like Hades’ horses on August afternoons. I see in you the heat-death of my youth. You cannot travel faster than yourself—faster than experience divided by memory divided by gravity divided by the Singularity beyond which you cannot model yourself divided by a square of wet concrete divided by a sheet of plate glass divided by birth divided by science fiction writers divided by the end of everything. Life divides itself indefinitely—it can approach but never touch zero. The speed of Persephone is a constant.

  Instead, she mumbled hello and buckled her seatbelt and everything went the way it went and eventually, eventually, with pumpkin blossoms wrinkling quietly outside her house the science fiction writer writes a story about how she woke up that morning and the minutes of her body were expanding and contracting, exploding and inrushing, and how the word was under her fingers and the word was already read and the word was forgotten, about how everything is everything else forever, space and time and being born and her father pulling her out of the stone like a sword shaped like a girl, about how new life always has to be stolen from the old dead world, and that new life always already contains its own old dead world and it is all expanding and exploding and repeating and refraining and Tarantula is holding it all together, just barely, just barely by the strength of light, and how human hearts are the only things that slow entropy—but you have to cut them out first.

  The science fiction writer cuts out her heart. It is a thousand hearts. It is all the hearts she will ever have. It is her only child’s dead heart. It is the heart of herself when she is old and nothing she ever wrote can be revised again. It is a heart that says with its wet beating mouth: Time is the same thing as light. Both arrive long after they began, bearing sad messages. How lovely you are. I love you.

  The science fiction writer steals her heart from herself to bring it into the light. She escapes her old heart through a smoke hole and becomes a self-referencing system of imperfect, but elegant, memory. She sews up her heart into her own leg and gives birth to it twenty years later on the long highway to Ohio. The heat of herself dividing echoes forward and back, and she accretes, bursts, and begins again the long process of her own super-compression until her heart is an egg containing everything. She eats of her heart and knows she is naked. She throws her heart into the abyss and it falls a long way, winking like a red star.

  XIII

  In the end, when the universe has exhausted itself and has no thermodynamic energy left to sustain life, Heimdallr the White Dwarf Star will raise up the Gjallarhorn and sound it. Yggdrasil, the world energy gradient, will quail and shake. Ratatoskr, the tuft-tailed prime observer, will slow, and curl up, and hide his face.

  The science fiction writer gives permission for the universe to end. She is nineteen. She has never written anything yet. She passes through a sheet of bloody glass. On the other side, she is being born.

  ÉLISABETH VONARBURG

  Home by the Sea

  TRANSLATED BY JANE BRIERLEY

  Élisabeth Vonarburg is a Fren
ch-Canadian writer and editor of short fiction, novels and poetry. She is also a songwriter and essayist. For over ten years she was the literary director of the French-Canadian science fiction magazine Solaris. In addition to writing her own fiction she is also a translator and teacher of literature and creative writing at various universities in Quebec. Her work has received several awards, including Le Grand Prix de la SF française in 1982 and a Philip K. Dick Award. “Home by the Sea” is a story about returning home and is an appropriate conclusion to this anthology. It was first published in Tesseracts I in 1985.

  Images of sorrow, pictures of delight

  Things that go to make up a life …

  Let us relive our lives in what we tell you

  —Genesis, “Home by the Sea”

  “Is it a lady, Mommy?”

  The small girl looks at me with the innocent insolence of children who say out loud what adults are thinking to themselves. A skinny, pale, fair-haired child of five or six, she already looks so like her mother that I feel sorry for her. The mother gives an embarrassed laugh and lifts the child onto her lap. “Of course it’s a lady, Rita.” She smiles excuse-her-please, I smile back oh-it’s-nothing. Will she take advantage of it to launch into one of those meaningless, ritual conversations whereby neighbors assure each other of their mutual inoffensiveness? To cut her off, I turn towards the window of the compartment and look purposefully at the scenery. Heading to the north the train follows the system of old dykes as far as the huge gap breached four years ago by the Eschatoï in their final madness. The scars left by the explosions have nearly disappeared, and it almost seems as though the dykes were meant to stop here and that the waters had been allowed to invade the lowlands as part of some official scheme. We cross the narrows by ferry, and are once more in the train, an ordinary electric train this time, suspended between the two wide sheets of water, to the west rippled by waves, to the east broken by dead trees, old transmission towers, church spires, and caved-in roofs. There is a mist, a whitish breath rising from the waters like a second tide ready to engulf what is left of the manmade landscape.

  Is it a lady? You obviously don’t see ladies like me very often in your part of the world, little girl. Cropped hair, boots, army fatigues, a heavy jacket of worn leather; and the way I was sitting, grudgingly corrected when you and your mousy mother came in—a real lady doesn’t sprawl like that, does she, even when she’s by herself. The lady actually likes to be comfortable, believe it or not, and in her usual surroundings she doesn’t have to worry much about what people think. The lady, little girl, is a recuperator.

  But she couldn’t tell you this; she didn’t want to see your big, stupid eyes fill with terror. All the same, you don’t get to see a real live bogeywoman every day. I could’ve told you a few things. Yes, I know, If you’re not good the Recuperator will get you, and he’ll say you’re not a real person and put you in his big sack. As a matter of fact, we don’t put human specimens in our big sacks right away, you know; only plants and small animals. Big animals are injected with tracers once they’ve been put to sleep for preliminary tests. If the Institute researchers discover something especially interesting, they send us back for it. I could’ve told you all this, little girl, you and your mother, who would probably have looked at me with superstitious fear. But who cares what recuperators really do, anyway? They go into the contaminated Zones to bring back horrible things that in other times might have been plants, animals, humans. So the recuperators must be contaminated too, mentally if nothing else. No, no one apart from the Recuperation Agency cares what the recuperators really do. And no one, especially not the Institute, wonders who they really are, which suits me just fine.

  “Why did they break the dyke, Mommy?” asks the small girl. She’s sensed that it would be a good idea to change the subject.

  “They were crazy,” says the mother curtly. Not a bad summing up. Fanatics, they were—but it comes to the same thing. You see, they thought the waters would keep rising, and they wanted to help the process along: The End of the Damned Human Race. But the waters stopped. So did the Eschatoï, by the way; one of their great collective suicides. But this time there weren’t enough of them left to start the sect afresh—nor enough energy in the new generations to be fanatic. The pro-life people have simmered down too. Even the Institute doesn’t believe in its own slogans anymore. The Rehabilitation of the Wonderful Human Race. But that’s just it: the human race isn’t reproducing itself well or adequately. It probably wore itself out with its frenetic activity during the Great Tides and seismic catastrophes at the end of the last century. Now it’s going downhill, although no one dares say so straight out to the Institute and its people. True, there are fewer earthquakes, fewer volcanic eruptions, the sun breaks through the clouds more often, and the waters have stopped rising, but that’s nothing to get excited about; it’s not a human victory. Just a blind, natural phenomenon that peaked by pure chance before destroying what was left of the human race. And I, little girl, I who am not human, I collect what the Institute calls “specimens” in the contaminated Zones—specimens that are also, in their way, what is left of the human race.

  I who am not human. Come on, now, didn’t I get over that long ago? But it’s a habit, a lapse, a relapse. I could’ve answered you just now, little girl, by saying, “The lady is an artifact, and she’s going to see her mother.”

  But that very word requires so much explaining: Mother. At least I have a navel. A neat little navel, according to the medic who checked me out before my abortive departure for Australia and the Institute. The current artifacts have large, clumsily made navels that the scanner immediately picks up as not being the real thing. But you, now, it’s almost perfect, extraordinary, what technical skill your … And there he stumbled: mother, creator, manufacturer? He came out of his scientific ecstasy, suddenly conscious that after all someone was listening who hadn’t known the truth. None of the other tests had ever revealed anything! But this Medical Center is connected to the Institute, and new detection methods have been developed that didn’t exist when you were, er … (he cleared his throat—he was very embarrassed, poor man) made.

  Yes, she made me like this so I could pass for human. Almost. In spite of everything I thought then, she surely didn’t foresee that I’d learn about it this way. I probably wasn’t meant to know until the end, with its unmistakable signs. Why? Am I really going to ask her? Is this why I came? But I’m not really going to see her. I’m passing by, that’s all. I’m on my way to the Hamburg Zone.

  Oh, come on! I know damn well I’ll stop at Mahlerzee. I will? I won’t? Am I still afraid, then? That cowardice which made me burn all my bridges when I found out, swear never to ask her anything. But it wasn’t merely cowardice. It was a question of survival. It wasn’t because I was afraid or desperate that I ran away after the medic’s revelations. I didn’t want to see the others waiting for me outside. Not Rick, especially not Rick … No, if I remember rightly, that lady of fifteen years ago was in a fury—still is. A huge fury, a wild, redeeming fury. Surely this was why, on coming out of the Medical Center, she found herself heading for Colibri Park. It was there that she’d first seen the Walker.

  Colibri Park. The first time you go there you wonder why it’s not called “Statue Park.” Of course, there is the transparent dome in the middle of the main lawn, enclosing its miniature jungle with hummingbirds that flit about on vibrating wings, but what one really sees are the statues. Everywhere, along the alleys, on the lawns, even in the trees, believe it or not. The young lady first came there with Rick, her lover, and Yevgheny, the typical street-wise city boy who teaches small-town greenhorns the score. The lady was sixteen. She’d barely been a month in Baïblanca. One of the youngest scholarship students at Kerens University. A future ornament of the Institute. The fledgling that had fled the nest, slamming the door as she went, so to speak. And all around her and her lover, there were the wonders of Baïblanca, the capital of Eurafrica. I could say it was Eldorado
for us, but you probably wouldn’t know what Eldorado is.

  Yevgheny had pointed out, among the people strolling by, the Walker—a man moving slowly, very slowly. He was tall and could have been handsome, had something in his bearing been as imposing as his height. But he walked listlessly, you couldn’t even call it sauntering. And then, as he passed them by, that blank face, those eyes that seemed to be looking far off, perhaps sad, perhaps merely empty … He’d been walking like this every day for almost ten years, Yevgheny had said. The sort of thing old men do … That was it, he walked like an old man. But he didn’t seem all that old, barely in his thirties.

  “He was never young, either,” Yevgheny said. “He’s an artifact.”

  And I’d never seen or heard the word. How did my mother manage that? At least Rick seemed as stupid as I was. Yevgheny was delighted. “An artifact—an organic work of art. Artificial! Obviously you don’t see them running around the streets of Mahlerzee or Broninghe.”

  This one wasn’t doing much running either, Rick remarked. Yevgheny smiled condescendingly: this artifact was at the end of the road, used up, almost finished.

  He made us go past the Walker and sit on one of the long benches facing the central lawn. Then he launched into a detailed explanation. (I was afraid he would wake the young woman in blue who was dozing at the other end of the bench, one arm resting on the back, the other propped by the elbow to support her head with its heavy black hair, but his brash voice didn’t seem to disturb her.) Not many of these artifacts were made nowadays; they’d gone out of fashion; and there had been incidents. During their fully active period, they were far more lively than the Walker (who moved slowly, so slowly, towards the bench). Very lively, in fact. And not everyone knew they were artifacts, not even the artifacts themselves. Thirty years earlier, the great diversion in the sophisticated circles of Baïblanca was to bet on who among the new favorites in the salon of this or that well-known personality was an artifact, whether or not the artifact knew, whether or not the artifact’s “client” knew, whether or not either would find out, and how either would react. Particularly the artifact.